18 ms·

Lambda is Greek for CGI script.

by fswd 4y ago

mjb 4y ago
In a way, sure. But Lambda also does things that CGI didn't do: dynamic auto-scaling, integration with queues and streams for async processing, strong security isolation with fine-grained authorization, host failure detection and recovery, datacenter failure resilience, and many other things. The interface being familiar and relatively analogous to existing things is intentional. The point is to be different where being different helps, and familiar where being different doesn't help.
- tedunangst 4y ago
  You get like 90% of that dropping your CGI directory on NFS shared among multiple hosts. AWS offers a full featured host environment, so you don't have to build that part, but the part you write is quite similar.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Did CGI allow you to have your individual CGI scripts in separate containers?
    - mhitza 4y ago
      If it talks via FastCGI you could have individual containers per whatever unit of segmentation you'd like.
throwaway2016a 4y ago
As someone who has been around long enough to actually remember setting up /cgi-bin/... there is a lot more to lambdas. They are scalable (including, importantly, down to zero!), have their own dedicated resources for each process, and are pretty efficient at being put to sleep and woken up. Plus the code is immutable by default and you get a lot out of the box like logging and setting limits. I wouldn't start a new project with CGI at all right now but I use Lambda constantly.
recuter 4y ago
In addition to what the other replies said I'd like to offer the following observation: Lambda is the control plane running inside an "AWS OS" context, that means it has access to internal apis with scoped permissions. Most commonly people discuss user facing lambdas on the edge, however you are not obligated to expose it to the world. If you do choose to go the cloud route understand that your account activities generate quite a lot of data. Simplest example would be custom CloudWatch events generated from say autoscaling groups i.e. "Server 23 has ram usage above some moving average threshold" => kick off lambda => custom logic (send email/slack, reboot server, spin up more instances, whatever). People who like middle brow dismissals would say "what does it matter where the script runs, it could just as easily be running on the instance itself" - to them I say, pain is the best teacher. :)

Lambda is Greek for CGI script.

by fswd 4y ago

Lambda is Greek for CGI script.

mjb 4y ago

In a way, sure. But Lambda also does things that CGI didn't do: dynamic auto-scaling, integration with queues and streams for async processing, strong security isolation with fine-grained authorization, host failure detection and recovery, datacenter failure resilience, and many other things. The interface being familiar and relatively analogous to existing things is intentional. The point is to be different where being different helps, and familiar where being different doesn't help.

tedunangst 4y ago
You get like 90% of that dropping your CGI directory on NFS shared among multiple hosts. AWS offers a full featured host environment, so you don't have to build that part, but the part you write is quite similar.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Did CGI allow you to have your individual CGI scripts in separate containers?
  - mhitza 4y ago
    If it talks via FastCGI you could have individual containers per whatever unit of segmentation you'd like.

throwaway2016a 4y ago

As someone who has been around long enough to actually remember setting up /cgi-bin/... there is a lot more to lambdas. They are scalable (including, importantly, down to zero!), have their own dedicated resources for each process, and are pretty efficient at being put to sleep and woken up. Plus the code is immutable by default and you get a lot out of the box like logging and setting limits. I wouldn't start a new project with CGI at all right now but I use Lambda constantly.

recuter 4y ago

In addition to what the other replies said I'd like to offer the following observation: Lambda is the control plane running inside an "AWS OS" context, that means it has access to internal apis with scoped permissions. Most commonly people discuss user facing lambdas on the edge, however you are not obligated to expose it to the world. If you do choose to go the cloud route understand that your account activities generate quite a lot of data. Simplest example would be custom CloudWatch events generated from say autoscaling groups i.e. "Server 23 has ram usage above some moving average threshold" => kick off lambda => custom logic (send email/slack, reboot server, spin up more instances, whatever). People who like middle brow dismissals would say "what does it matter where the script runs, it could just as easily be running on the instance itself" - to them I say, pain is the best teacher. :)